arstechnica.com is reporting that DOCSIS 3.0 might be hitting US shores soon. This technology, which allows download speeds to 160Mbps and upload speeds to 120Mbps and also supports IPv6, is already in use in South Korea. This basically blows anything out of the water that is currently being used by cable companies here in the US.

There is of course, Verizon’s FIOS network. This has even greater capacity than DOCSIS 3.0, but most of the bandwidth is reserved for TV purposes. Now, when can we expect this to hit us and how much will it costs?

Comcast plans to demo DOCSIS 3.0 at The Cable Show this week and, more importantly, plans to begin DOCSIS 3.0 trials later this year, according to Cable Digital News. Large-scale DOCSIS 3.0 deployments are unlikely to begin until next year, and a November 2006 report estimated that only 40 percent of the cable modems in use will support the technology by 2011â€â€?by that time, FiOS will be available to well over 18 million households in the US. Still, it’s encouraging to see one of those “three-to-five-years-away” technologies poised to finally hit the market.

-via arstechnica.com